White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Jim Crow’s Legacy

42 My grandmother’s friends called the black women they hired for domestic duties “the help,” and they all seemed to employ at least one “girl” for their housework. Hanni used a day worker named Amelia. Following the southern custom, Amelia was always addressed by her first name, but she always called my grandmother “Miz Wallerstein.” She called me “Miz Clara” because I was a child. On the days that Amelia came to work, she changed from her street clothes in a small room at the back of Hanni’s house. Into a closet went her pocketbook and off came the pumps and sheath dress that she wore to ride the city bus to work. Over her bony frame and graystreaked hair flattened by clips went a gray dress with a white collar and well-worn loafers. She had worked for the family for years. The first day she saw me after we arrived from Chicago, she gave me a big hug, clamping me to her uniform, which smelled like Ajax. In a certain way, she was like family—part of a long, southern tradition of relationships between white and black people that were often more like Driving Miss Daisy than Gone with the Wind. There had been a succession of other maids before Amelia. Some worked exclusively for my grandparents; others split their time between my grandparents, Ed, and other members of the extended family. We still have photos of some of these women, taken on the front porch. They slicked the kink from their hair, pinned it into tidy buns. They wore white aprons over their uniforms. Were they embarrassed to go out front to pose for these pictures, away from the back doors and kitchens that were their usual province? We also have recipes from a few of the maids, written in Hanni’s flowing script. How ironic that these women didn’t know how to write down their recipes, and that my grandmother never really learned how to cook. Hanni collected recipes from all her friends, probably because recipe swapping was expected of southern women, but all I ever saw her do was toast bread and boil frozen vegetables. When my mother was little, the maids lived at the house. In a way, they formed a buffer between my mother and her parents. They Jim Crow’s Legacy 43 disciplined but also nurtured, as they fed my mother “Cho-Cho the Health Clown” sandwiches, watched her wheel up and down the street on her bicycle, and met her at the front door when she came home from school. One maid, Lucille, let my mother sit on the back porch after school as Lucille played the numbers with the runners who went from house to house, or waited for her boyfriend to stop by for a brief, somewhat clandestine, visit. My mother later said she felt privileged getting an insider’s glimpse into a black person’s real life. Black men had service jobs, too, usually as gardeners or chauffeurs . A few were caddies at the Lakeside Country Club, where my grandfather was a golf champion. Apparently, my grandfather was so well liked that a group of caddies came to pay their respects at his funeral, even though they had to sit in the back of the synagogue. My mother did her own cooking and laundry but hired maids to come once a week to clean the house. I remember Alberta, a lightskinned black woman with long arms and legs, from Chicago. When I was about five, I sat at the kitchen table watching her sweep the floor. Her wrinkled face looked like an old walnut shell. My mother was upstairs resting in her bedroom and Suzanne was outside riding her bike up and down the street. “Black skin is ugly,” I said. Alberta stopped sweeping and frowned at me. “Sit down,” she said, motioning me into a chair at the kitchen set. She propped the broom against the wall and sat down next to me. “Now, hold out your hand.” She found a piece of white notepaper and held it up against my wrist. Then she held her own wrist next to the base of the lamp at the table. “See, now, your skin is white, like this piece of paper.” I stared at it, thinking that no, my skin was really more of a peach color, not stark white like the paper. But I kept listening. “And mine is brown like the lamp here. But...